One of the best ways to improve our understanding of the stellar
activity-induced signal in radial velocity (RV) measurements is through
simultaneous high-precision photometric and RV observations. This is of prime
importance to mitigate the RV signal induced by stellar activity and therefore
unveil the presence of low-mass exoplanets. The K2 Campaign 7 and 8
field-of-views were located in the southern hemisphere, and provided a unique
opportunity to gather unprecedented simultaneous high precision photometric
observation with K2 and high-precision RV measurements with the HARPS
spectrograph to study the relationship between photometric variability and RV
jitter. We observed nine stars with different levels of activity; from quiet to
very active. We probe the presence of any meaningful relation between measured
RV jitter and the simultaneous photometric variation, and also other activity
indicators (e.g. BIS, FWHM, logRHK′, and F8), by evaluating the strength
and significance of the correlation between RVs and each indicator. We found
that for the case of very active stars, strong and significant correlations
exist between almost all the observables and measured RVs; however, for lower
activity levels the correlations become random. Except for the F8 which its
strong correlation with RV jitter persists over a wide range of stellar
activity level, and thus our result suggests that F8 might be a powerful proxy
for activity induced RV jitter. Moreover, we examine the capability of two
state-of-the-art modeling techniques, namely the FF' method and SOAP2.0, in
accurately predicting the RV jitter amplitude using the simultaneous
photometric observation. We found that for the very active stars both
techniques can reasonably well predict the amplitude of the RV jitter, however,
at lower activity levels the FF' method underpredicts the RV jitter amplitude.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in A&